Don't take my Kodachrome away

This NPR story on saving the American brand starts with Kodak, which "basically invented digital photography"**, but still didn't survive the transition to digital cameras.  



The answer to that is pretty simple, I think.  Even in Paul Simon's song, he had a Nikon camera -- "Kodak" is synonymous with "film", and not "camera" (except for gimmicks like the Kodak Disc), so that when film became obsolete, Kodak went with it.  Next, because of smartphones, the point-and-shoot camera market is dead, so unless a camera company has invested in making SLR's, they're SOL, too.

** Wikipedia summarizes where the research was.  Kodak had the tech, but not the branding. Looking at the market share section, we're in a Canon and Nikon world with a few fringe players.

Adventures in editing

A couple of items from the hard drive's vault.  There are lots of editorial mistakes in printed books.  I can't help but see them.  I don't hold it against professional editors for missing them; I myself am terrible at finding these sorts of things when I purposefully set out to find them.  It's just that every once in a while, I have to write down a particularly awkward passage.

Just to the south of them, the new Socket was like a titanic concrete bunker, the new elevator cable rising out of it like an elevator cable, standing alone as if in some version of the Indian rope trick, thin and black and straight as a plumb line dropping down from heaven - visible for only a few tall skyscrapers' worth of height, at most - and, given the wreckage they stood in, and the immensity of the volcano's bare rocky peak, as fragile-looking as if it were a single carbon nanotube filament, rather than a bundle of billions of them, and the strongest structure ever made.  "This is weird," Art said, feeling hollow and unsettled.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, pg 99 of the Bantam Books 1995 softcover

Not only does this have a horrible run-on sentence of simile and metaphor, Robinson appears to be asserting the reflexive property of space elevator cables, just in case we weren't sure.

She was particularly interested in the activities of the World Court, which was trying to establish itself as an arbitrator in the growing conflict of the Subarashii metanats and the Group of Eleven against Praxis, Switzerland, and the developing China-India alliance - trying to function, as Art had put it, "as a sort of world court."

Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, pg 556-557 of the Bantam Books 1995 softcover

Again with the reflexive comparisons, this time applied to world courts.  I suppose the World Court could have been trying to function like a kangaroo, or perhaps Margaret, Court.

Agora (2009)

Mercy asphyxiations for everyone!


Agora feels like a weird title for this film, maybe because the attention of the film itself is divided.  It's set in Alexandria during Hypatia's lifetime, and Hypatia is nominally our central character (); certainly, she's the only one I really care for.  But Hypatia's life is centered around the Library of Alexandria, not the Agora (if "agora" is even the right word for that space in a Roman Egyptian, if historically Hellenistic, city -- given that the filmmakers seem to have done their best to pass at least the Wikipedia test of the armchair factcheckers at home, like me), so I wonder why they didn't simply call the film "Hypatia".  Maybe "Agora" sounded cooler, or they deliberately wanted to draw our active attention to the religious and political conflict between pagans, jews, and christians. I'm voting for the latter, and Ashraf Barhom does a great job as the christian rabble-rouser, stealing every scene he's in.

Everyone wants to sell you Greek yogurt...

... presumably because it has a higher protein content than regular yogurt, and high protein is hot in American nutrition right now.  Cabot now sells a "Greek-style" yogurt.  Our store had the whole milk and lowfat vanilla bean varieties, so I tried the vanilla bean.  It's perfectly tasty, though they went heavy on the sugar (triple the amount in the regular lowfat) and vanilla flavor, but it has the taste and texture of vanilla pudding.  This-- this is not Greek yogurt.  So is this because they don't know how to make actual Greek yogurt, or because they want to differentiate themselves in a burgeoning "Greek-style" yogurt market, or...?

Hard Landing; Algis Budrys; 1993

This short novel / long novella (it doesn't quite reach 200 pages with big type and a relatively small page) has promise, but doesn't quite work.  The frame is that someone has learned of a government organization that investigates and covers up evidence of aliens, and we're reading their research... except for the parts that are from the perspective of the aliens and couldn't possibly be recorded by anyone.  By including chapters from the 3rd person present POV of the aliens, they end up not being very alien, and because their characters are rather flat (this is not Budrys's strength), these sections don't add much.  I think he needed to present the entire work as a collection of the researcher's notes and acquired evidence of the existence of aliens; those chapters, like "Transcribed Conversation; Albert Camus; William Henshaw:" work well and kept me reading.

I am not the student you're looking for

Normally, the junk mail from Northwestern is addressed to Sarah (as an alum with a Comp Lit MA), but this was addressed to me.  Apparently, someone in the School of Continuing Studies had the bright idea to buy the American Statistical Association's mailing list for a pool of potential applicants for their online Master of Science in Predictive Analytics program.

The fun and irony of this is that choosing whom to mail in the hopes that they will respond to your offer (whether it's a Masters program, car insurance, or commemorative plates) is a problem of predictive analytics!  So, how well they do in choosing whom to mail from the pool of potential applicants should provide some evidence of the quality of the program, right?

They've started off well, by choosing a group that might actually be interested in predictive analytics, relative to the whole of humanity.  However, if I were building a model for determining whom to mail, I'd think there would be a very low response rate from people who work for companies that build statistical software, especially companies that have done the most work to build the predictive analytics "brand" and made Northwestern's MSPA program possible.  The fact that I've been sent a postcard advertising this program is, to my mind, a black mark against it.  

To be fair, it could also very well be that the costs of printing and mailing a postcard to me are more than offset by the cost of doing the necessary work to determine that there's a vanishingly small chance of me applying (not to mention the benefits if I should apply to their program).  Of course, the idea that it's better to just mail the whole pool of potential applicants is not exactly a message that those of us who make a living off predictive analytics approve of.

Virtual Physical Comedy

LinkedIn has Skills & Expertise in beta, and the greatest expertise of all is Physical Comedy.  Note in particular the third related skill:

Oh, yeah, everyone's an expert at juggling *and* Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.

That Primary Industry is hilarious

And now I will do an interpretative dance that tells the story of an improperly set MIME type with no filename extension to fall back on.

Midnight in Paris (2011)

We had strong reservations about seeing another Woody Allen movie, but Netflix promised a 3.5 for us, so we queued up Midnight in Paris.  Not only did it not disappoint, it charmed.  Sure, there's rampant name dropping, and Inez, her parents, and Paul are ludicrously Dursleyized -- note to Woody (and Rowling): it's possible, even preferable, for two people to not be right for each other without making one of them the bad guy and beating us over the head with it --, and if you're not careful you imagine an aging Woody instead of Owen Wilson in the lead role... but all in all, we were happy.  The cast does well, but we were entranced by Corey Stoll in the role of Hemingway.  His performance goes beyond caricature into something I don't have a word for, and manages to hit on something true.  I really dislike Hemingway's novels, but this made me want to hang with Hemingway.